The #1 key to improve your performance

In my previous career I ran a professional photography business for over 20 years with my partner Christine.

Everything was going great, when one day I was playing squash and snapped my Achilles tendon.  I was laid up on a couch for three months, so I had time to think about what I really wanted to do with my life. The business was suffering badly and I was dissatisfied (and so was Christine), so I knew things had to change.

I met a coach and a counsellor at a barbeque, and we had a deep and meaningful conversation where it became crystal clear to me what my purpose in life would be. So over the next five years as a counsellor, coach and leadership consultant I trained some of the best people in the world. I’ve worked with diverse groups such as royalty, heads of state, CEOs and their teams, to some of the most disadvantaged and broken people in the world.

Why am I telling you this?

In every instance they wanted just one thing:  To be happy and satisfied with their life at home, and in their relationships, careers and their organisations.

During my work with these individuals I became curious about the question, how do people transform their lives to become more satisfied and happier?

I became dedicated to finding the answer, and studied philosophers, leadership gurus, the latest brain science, human behaviour and development, and many programmes on transformation. And I learned many theories I would apply to my consultancy.

One day I felt like I was having a heart attack. This isn’t good, I thought. Here I am teaching my clients about stress and anxiety, and then this happens. The more I tried to stop the panic attack, the more it persisted. I tried everything from breathing, meditation, positive thoughts and cognitive behavioural therapy.

When an Argentinian friend (a psychiatrist and corporate coach, Dr Carlos Raimundo) came to visit, he taught me a powerful technique that enabled me to eliminate my stress and unhappiness overnight by creating a powerful new model for my life.

I’ve successfully used this process for myself and hundreds of my clients, which I’ve included in my upcoming book that’s soon to be launched (watch for updates!).

I’ll share its key principles in a moment. But before I do, I want to give you a bit of background about how I developed my programme.  I organised and ran the 2014 Global Women’s Leadership Summit with over 6,000 participants and 60 world-class presenters, including Cherie Blair, Marianne Williamson, John Gray, and Gretchen Rubin, to name just a few.

After twelve months of working around the clock, I was exhausted, financially depleted, and feeling quite depressed. It dawned on me I had been promoting many top authors and experts, and yet had my own important message that wasn’t being shared with the world.

I kept hearing the same old self-help notion that you have to do something or be someone special to be successful and happy. You have to follow a formula, or have certain success habits and emulate the so-called gurus.

This was driving me completely crazy!

I felt it was time for a brand new message that firmly states there is nothing wrong with you as you are already good enough! You already have enough! You’re not alone! And you belong in this world!

Just as the mighty oak tree gets all it needs from the acorn it originated from you have everything you need to succeed, which can be unlocked within you with the right key.

During this time of development, I sought solace in the writings of the late Anthony de Mello, an Indian Jesuit and spiritual advisor. His writings were so controversial and popular that they were censored by the Catholic Church. (He mysteriously died at 56 years of age, and his death is still shrouded in mystery.)

De Mello told the story of a man who found a still-warm eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life he thought he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled, and he’d thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked,

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbour. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth — we’re chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

The parable moved me powerfully as it felt like my own life, and inspired me to tell my own story in which I use the barnyard to represent the caged inauthentic life I was stuck in, and the eagle to represent the freedom and the greatness we all have within us.

The key distinction I want to make is how you’re stuck in life is perfectly matched to the way your life shows up for you.

For example, if you see yourself being stuck in a barnyard, your feelings and actions will become a barrier against success. It doesn’t matter what you want or are trying to attract into your life, you’re limited by how you see your situation. However, if you see yourself as being free, then your feelings and actions will match.

In summary, all your feelings and actions are a perfect match for how you see your situation, and has nothing to do with what you know or with what you want.

You may be asking is there a way to change the way you see things that provides for lasting positive change? The answer is yes, of course there is.

There’s a very simple process I use with my clients to enable them to build a powerful new way of seeing their life in the future so they can have lasting positive feelings of happiness and success. Their actions will be reenergized to produce extraordinary new levels of performance.